Global Warming

A New Economic System for a World in Rapid Disintegration. The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here - Rolling Stone. Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated.

In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco.
Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution — ThinkProgress. Macroeconomics and Household Heterogeneity. NBER Working Paper No. 22319Issued in June 2016NBER Program(s): EFG LS ME PE POL The goal of this chapter is to study how, and by how much, household income, wealth, and preference heterogeneity amplify and propagate a macroeconomic shock.

Louisiana climate refugees - Yale Climate Connections. Roch Naquin grew up with his five brothers and sisters on the Isles de Jean Charles in Louisiana.

The island supported about a hundred families of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe. Many families had gardens and grew their own vegetables, and the fishing and trapping were abundant. NAQUIN: “We would trap muskrat, minks, otters, coons, things of this nature.” Although Naquin left the island years ago when he became a Catholic priest, he recently retired and moved back to the home of his youth. But he will not be able to stay. A combination of sinking land and sea-level rise has submerged more than ninety-five percent of the island, and fewer than forty families remain.
Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre. Books discussed in this essay: Far North by Marcel Theroux Picador, 2010, 320 pp.

I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet edited by Mark Martin Verso, 2011, 208 pp. Back to the Garden by Clara Hume Moon Willow Press, 2012, 271 pp. The Healer: A Novel by Antti Tuomainen, Henry Holt and Co., 2013, 224 pp.
Bill Gates Explains Why Only Socialism Can Save the Climate. Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism.

The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it.
Scientists tell us we need bold action, not incremental change.
Kenyan Photographer Suspends Reality With Portraits Of Nairobi’s Informal Economy Workers Okayafrica.

Photo: Ginny Suss The photos from Kenyan visual artist Tahir Carl Karmali’s Jua Kali series are straight out of Mad Max, if Mad Max was in Nairobi and starred Kenyan artisans.

Born and raised in Nairobi, Karmali moved to New York two years ago to pursue his Masters of Digital Photography at SVA. For Jua Kali, he worked closely with found object artists and sculptors to explore the theme of the Kenyan economy and how the informal sector, the jua kali workers, are fueling the city of Nairobi. Part photography, part sculptural, the surrealist pictures combine intricate, high-tech portraits of Kenya’s informal economy workers–the jua kali–with stunning abstract paintings of East African landscapes.
The vivisection of oikeios: beyond the binary of nature and society. The common-sense distinction between nature and society was established through the bloody history of capitalist and colonial development, which brought about a real separation between the social and natural worlds.

What happens when the salmon people can no longer catch salmon in their rivers?
- Jeff Corntassel When I was a child I slept in a room at the back of my parent’s house. During the summer, the old wisteria would climb up the garden wall, over the window-sill and spill into my room. Great green crickets would crawl up the stems and find themselves suddenly inside, I can remember watching them pace my ceiling in the half-light before I fell asleep.
Tshering Tobgay: This country isn't just carbon neutral. Fla. gov. bans the terms climate change, global warming. If Florida Gov.

Rick Scott didn't want the terms "climate change" or "global warming" officially associated with his state, he won't be happy with the media attention his decision has sparked. Scott, a Republican, banned the use of those terms in state communications and publications shortly after he took office in 2011, according to a Miami Herald story Sunday by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Though it was not a written rule, "we were told not to use the terms 'climate change,' 'global warming' or 'sustainability,' " Christopher Byrd, a former attorney with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's (DEP) Office of General Counsel told the investigative reporting center. "That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors," said Boyd, who held that post from 2008 to 2013.
The constitutional right to a healthier climate.

Our nation’s Founders elected not to restrict the Constitution’s fundamental guarantees to just one generation.

Instead, they aimed to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” They took account of future generations by establishing an enduring guide to those principles most relevant to our nation’s fundamental challenges, including those arising centuries after the Constitution’s signing. Our nation’s outsized role in causing dangerous climate change presents such a fundamental problem. Though we comprise less than 5 percent of the world population, cumulative fossil fuel emissions from the United States exceed 25 percent of the world total, far outstripping contributions from China, Russia, Germany, or Britain. Advertisement. Zalasiewicz%20et%20al%20QI2015. Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth. Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans.

The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry. The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

"It makes world history.
The Rights of Nature must be recognised in law. Capitalism's favoured economistic approach will not protect the environment, because it involves a further commodification of nature's ecosystems - embracing precisely the same framework that has failed us so miserably.

At this week's Green Party conference we will be putting forward a proposal to adopt Rights of Nature into the Green Party's policies. Central to this motion are the rights of nature to 'exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, as well as the right to restoration'. Currently Britain's piecemeal environmental regulations consider nature as an object of commerce within the law, and thus they prevent us from protecting ecosystems in any meaningful sense.
Resilience.org.

'Dawn of the Brain Dead' - Photos - New York Daily News front pages on the presidential election. Leaked Documents Undermine Official Story Of Flint Water Crisis. As tens of thousands of Flint, Michigan, residents remain without drinkable tap water and are wondering if their children will face lifelong damage from lead exposure, new documents released in recent days cast significant doubts on the narrative embraced by Gov. Rick Synder’s (R) administration regarding how and why the city’s water supply was replaced by corrosive Flint River water to begin with. In 2011, Snyder ordered a state takeover of Flint’s government amid the city’s mounting financial woes. During its time in receivership, a series of Snyder appointees served as “emergency managers,” overseeing Flint’s government functions and finding ways to cut spending. Two years later, one of those managers, Darnell Earley, implemented a plan to switch Flint’s water supply from the Detroit system to a new consortium and to use water from the Flint River in the interim.

He claimed this would save $6 to $8 million, one city council member recalled to the Associated Press.
Michigan’s Great Stink. In the 1850s, London, the world’s largest city, still didn’t have a sewer system. Waste simply flowed into the Thames, which was as disgusting as you might imagine. But conservatives, including the magazine The Economist and the prime minister, opposed any effort to remedy the situation. After all, such an effort would involve increased government spending and, they insisted, infringe on personal liberty and local control.
In Florida, officials ban term 'climate change'
The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists.

Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years. But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency on the front lines of studying and planning for these changes. DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. The policy goes beyond semantics and has affected reports, educational efforts and public policy in a department with about 3,200 employees and $1.4 billion budget. This unwritten policy went into effect after Gov. Vinyard has since resigned.
In Wyoming, Taking A Photo Of A Polluted Stream Could Land You In Jail. To some, Wyoming’s Senate Bill 12 — otherwise known as the Data Trespass Bill — is merely a deepening of preexisting trespass laws — a way for private landowners to seek recourse from individuals trespassing on their property to collect data.

Evidence that Earth's first mass extinction was caused by critters not catastrophe. Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat. Freak storm pushes North Pole 50 degrees above normal to melting point. The Tipping Point. When I left the Arctic after my last photographic expedition there in August 2011, I knew — I could feel it, I could see it — that the “tipping point” we’d all been talking about had been breached. I knew it was no longer about whether we could avoid it: humanity was already living within a new paradigm.

DN!
Big Oil braced for global warming while it fought regulations. The rise of climate fiction: When literature takes on global warming and devastating droughts. Climate fiction is hot right now.
Climate change in popular culture. After An Inconvenient Truth: the evolution of the 'climate change film'
Top 5 Climate Change Movies. Greenpeace exposes sceptics hired to cast doubt on climate science. Capitalism Is Saving the Climate, You Hippies. I Went Down the Rabbit Hole of a Fake Climate Change-Themed Real Estate Firm. Watch Climate Change Eat This Canadian Island. ExxonMobil Targets Journalists and Activists After Climate Change Investigation. Imagine if Exxon had told the truth on climate change. Climate sceptic Maurice Newman says world leaders embracing junk science. The best of climate science and humanity come together at AGU. How Obama Let Big Oil Drill in the Pristine Alaska Wilderness. Lobbying Spending Database Oil & Gas, 2015. Geoengineering, climate change scepticism and the ‘moral hazard’ argument: an experimental study of UK public perceptions.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. Free-Market Ideology and Environmental Degradation. 12 1ephemera may12. Storm09. Time for Revolt? Some Scientists Say 'Yes'
How a 'typo' nearly derailed the Paris climate deal. The millennials must keep up the pressure following the Paris climate deal. Paris climate deal: nearly 200 nations sign in end of fossil fuel era. PlanetOfWeeds. There is a new form of climate denialism to look out for – so don't celebrate yet. Takepart. Revealed: Keystone company's PR blitz to safeguard its backup plan. World's biggest PR firm calls it quits with American oil lobby – reports. Work of prominent climate change denier was funded by energy industry. Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers for 27 more years. d04142. If We Can't Stop This Tiny Alaskan Town From Falling Into the Sea, What Hope Is There for the Rest of Us?

Will these Alaska villagers be America's first climate change refugees?
Tale Of Two Alaskan Villages. Businesses to Get Guidelines for Disclosing Climate-Related Risks. Paris Climate Talks Avoid Scientists’ Idea of ‘Carbon Budget’
Greenland Is Melting Away. The Marshall Islands Are Disappearing. Geo-engineering: green versus greed in the race to cool the planet. Geo-engineering: green versus greed in the race to cool the planet. Without Government, the Marketplace Will Not Solve Climate Change.